ORNL Corporate Fellow and Geospatial Science and Human Security Division Director Budhu Bhaduri has been elected as a fellow of the American Association of Geographers. The honor recognizes Bhaduri for his “innovation, mentorship and wide-ranging leadership” in geographic sciences. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Budhendra “Budhu” Bhaduri has been elected a fellow of the American Association of Geographers, or AAG. The honor recognizes Bhaduri as “a world leader in innovation, development and application of research in human dynamics, geographic data science, remote sensing and scalable geocomputation.”
AAG is a nonprofit scientific and educational society that, since 1904, has worked for the advancement of geography in theory, method and practice. AAG membership comprises approximately 8,500 public, private and academic geographers and related professionals from nearly 100 countries. The AAG fellows program was established in 2018 to recognize members’ significant contributions to advancing geography.
“Although this is a personal recognition, it also reflects the long history of the Department of Energy’s and ORNL’s contributions to this field,” said Bhaduri, director of the Geospatial Science and Human Security Division and a Corporate Fellow at ORNL. “Many prominent geographers built a rich and pioneering legacy of geographical sciences at this laboratory. I’m fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with people like Tom Wilbanks, Jerry Dobson, John Sorensen and Marilyn Brown to get where I am today.”
As division director, Bhaduri oversees an interdisciplinary research portfolio focused on human dynamics, geographic data science and high-performance computing. Between 2014 and 2019, he founded and led ORNL’s Urban Dynamics Institute, a cross-disciplinary initiative that fostered a data-driven understanding of complex urban systems.
Over his career, Bhaduri has catalyzed the integration of geographical sciences into DOE’s energy, environment and national security missions.
“All three of these missions have distinct needs for geospatial information that allows us to understand how humans interact with the environment, especially the built environment, which drives energy demand, resource use and related national security concerns,” Bhaduri said. “The work I’ve been a part of during my career and that has led to this recognition really reinforces the significance of geographic sciences in the DOE mission.”
As a 2022 AAG fellow, Bhaduri joins an elite group of national scholars. He is the first DOE national laboratory staff elected as an AAG fellow, an honor he attributes to ORNL’s unique expertise and organizational commitment to recognizing geographic information science as a strategic discipline impacting solutions to global challenges.
“I have been fortunate to work with ORNL colleagues who forged novel approaches to developing human dynamics models and data and have demonstrated how high-performance computing can be brought to bear in helping analyze earth observation data at scale,” said Bhaduri. “This recognition is really a reflection of their collective excellence.”
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